This guide will take you through every step required to “tag” .FLAC files, using your Mac.
Note: this tutorial could just as easily have been called “How to tag FLAC, WAV and OGG Files” – as the process is the same for all of them.
Note: if you’re looking for instructions on how to do this in Windows, this is the tutorial for you.
- First things first, head over to the Tag download page and download the aptly named “Tag” App. Once the download has completed (it’s a small app and shouldn’t take long) – unzip the file and drag Tag.app to your Applications folder to install it. Then, open it from there.
- As you’ll see, the user interface is pretty simple (yay!)
- To start, open the “drawer” by going to the Apple Menu and selecting Tools then Files Drawer.
- The Files Drawer will ‘slide’ out on the right side of the Tag App. This drawer allows you to load multiple FLAC files, so you can add tags to more than one file at a time.
- Open a Finder window and locate the FLAC files that you want to tag. Select them all and then “drag and drop” them directly into the Files Drawer. For the sake of this tutorial we’ll be tagging all of the files that comprise one album.
- Select all of the files in your drawer by using the keyboard combination “Apple key + A” (⌘A). Or, select Edit from the Apple Menu, then Select All from the drop-down menu. By making sure all of the files are selected, you can edit all of them at once.
- Since we’re using an album as an example for this tutorial, many of the fields can be filled in with the same thing, as they apply to all of the songs on that album. As illustrated in the screenshot below, some of the fields that can be filled out once and then applied to all of the files are: the second field in Track: (ie. the total number of songs on the album), Disc:, Artist:, , Album:, Year:, Genre: and Composer:. If you know them, you can also fill in the MCN:, ISRC and Encoder: fields. Keep in mind, none of the fields are “mandatory”.
- Now that you’ve made “bulk” (or “batch”) changes to the files, it’s time to add the ‘custom’ fields – eg. the song Title: and Track: number.
From the drawer, select the first file. Give it a track number (1) and enter in the title of the song. Repeat this process until all of the files have their song names and track numbers.
- Once again, select all of the files in the File Drawer by using the keyboard combination “Apple key + A” (⌘A) – or Edit -> Select All
You’ll notice that the two fields that are ‘custom’ for each FLAC file – the Title and Track number – have a ‘yellow’ background and the message <Multiple Values> is displayed.
- To save all of the tags you’ve just added, select File from the Apple Menu and then Save.
- That’s it! If you quit Tag and then re-open one of the files you just tagged, you’ll see that they’re now stored within the FLAC file itself.
